Hannah Atallah
Hannah Atallah - Third Place Residency
August 9 - September 6, 2025
The Third Place Residency
The Third Place Residency at Making Space Bmore encourages artists to explore the concept of the Third Place—a space for artistic expression, collaboration, and community exchange that exists between home and work. Participating artists present and create in our multipurpose space, experiment with new practices, and investigate the role of art in transformative social change.
Hannah Atallah
Atallah’s immersive installation, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise (لسوء الحظ كانت جنّة), references oasis landscapes and motifs of Palestine, Jordan and Egypt. The English word, oasis comes from wahe or ouahe in Demotic Egyptian (c. 650 BC – 5th century AD), meaning “dwelling place.” As such, the existence of people in the land is embedded within the definition of the place. It inherently resists erasure. The patterns on the seats reference tatreez embroidery symbols and encoded iconography found in and near the wadis. Suspensions reference migratory holding patterns, where people are stuck in repeated phases of forced displacement and in fragile, uncertain states.
The textile and embroidery installation, Problems of Value (مشاكل القيمة), explores questions of value and labor within global power structures shaped by exploitation, forced enslavement, and colonial and imperial violence. Featuring weavings made on a backstrap loom and cricket loom combined with handmade tapestries that are resist dyed, sewed, embroidered, painted and screen printed, this work-in-progress evolved over the course of the residency. Visitors were also invited to participate in Turning the Tables, a community weaving project on a flipped table top loom, as developed by Baltimore artist Joyce Scott, during workshops facilitated by the artist and open gallery hours. Completed weavings were raffled to raise funds for families in Gaza.
Thank you to Joyce Scott, the BMA, SCRAP B-MORE, and the Blackrock for supporting the Turning the Tables project.
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